Taking stock of the Chicago concert-poster scene

An Andrew Bird poster by Jay Ryan.

An Andrew Bird poster by Jay Ryan.

Christopher Borrelli

The concert poster, as a piece of art to hang on the wall of a respectable, adult home, tends to be regarded somewhere between hip and post-collegiate futon; between savvy taste signifier and loud reminder to grow up. Which is uninformed, but understandable. At some point during the Pitchfork Music Festival this weekend, however, find time to wander Flatstock, the concert-poster art market that's been a highlight since it began in 2006. Picture a row of tents housing a couple of dozen smart, inventive graphic designers and illustrators from around the country. Then picture yourself blowing $200 fast, unable to resist.

Never again will you question the wisdom of hanging a concert poster over your dining room table.

Flatstock was started by the American Poster Institute, a nationwide collective of concert-poster makers created in 2002; its latest Pitchfork show is one of several dozen markets the group has organized throughout the United States and Europe in the past decade. That's a lot of Modest Mouse posters. On the other hand, that kind of longevity has resulted in class, depth, a dizzying range of styles.

Thursday night at Lincoln Hall, the Show N' Tell Show — the popular, semi-regular, design-centric talk show series — will focus on Flatstock and feature interviews with local poster-makers. Also Thursday, the Chicago Loop Alliance begins a monthlong "Metrospective" in the lobby of the Inland Steel Building, 30 W. Monroe St., a survey of concert posters (and art and photos) from the past 30 years at Metro in Wrigleyville. In the meantime, here are snapshots of a few celebrated Chicago illustrators and designers, all of whom will be at Flatstock.

Duggan, the It Boy of the local gig-poster scene, first met guitarist Erin Elders, of the band Maps & Atlases, when they were students at Columbia College. Duggan was studying advertising, "kind of growing sickened by the profession." So he started making posters for the band. Eight years and many more clients later, Duggan is still making posters for Maps & Atlases — images with the broad, sunny simplicity of advertising, tweaked with a vague sardonicism. Images of Mickey Mouse in Native American headdress, a raccoon eating Funyuns, a childlike scrawl of Indians and horses overrunning what appear to be cowboys.

"What I've come to love is that his ideas are bold," Elders said, "that you can just let Ryan work and be certain he'll deliver something thoughtful and edgy and that he knows where we're coming from. He's not going to design a poster for us that shows an ice cream cone urinating on a gravestone. Which he's done."

Yes, he has.

He's also drawn, for other bands, Gumby disembowling himself, a California Raisin on a raft, a nude woman with a squirrel, a cat vomiting on Mickey Mouse, a cinder block hurled at a Chicago police car. Last year at Pitchfork, Duggan made the official Flatstock poster: A man holding a sign that read "God Hates Posters."

"The thing about Ryan is that when you see one of his posters you realize you hadn't figured on seeing that image that day," said Paul Grushkin, the author of several coffee-table books about rock-poster art. "The sheer nuttiness, the self-criticism, the unsettlingness — it's so unexpected you can't help but smile a little." Said Chicago poster designer Daniel MacAdam: "When Ryan exploded on the scene a few years ago, he struck such a chord with everyone. I can't think of anyone who got that kind of big, immediate reaction. And it's so deserving — he has real wit, untempered by the usual constraints of taste. Plus, have you met him?"

Indeed: The most shocking thing about Duggan, considering how abrasive his imagery can be, is how astonishingly pleasant and unpretentious he is. He grew up near Fox Lake, in Johnsburg, a young admirer of artist Raymond Pettibon, whose work in the 1970s and early '80s co-opted mundane imagery in service of the Los Angeles hard-core punk scene. But he has a needlepoint sea gull hanging alongside the drafting table in his Avondale neighborhood home. He still works by day designing trade magazines with titles like Canadian Builders Quarterly; he's still designing the kind of tiny handbill posters that get stapled to telephone poles.

And he doesn't want to shock forever. He tells about a quiet, contemplative singer-songwriter who hired him recently. "His stuff was very heartfelt and acoustic, and when I listened to it I thought, 'What the (expletive) am I going to do with this?' So my first poster for was pretty laid back. And (the musician) wasn't into it," he said. "But he kept hiring me, and I could tell that he was trying to get me to think weirder and more dangerous, which was a strange thing, but that's what happening with me these days. Nobody complains, but (bands sometimes question the image) because it's not shocking enough — not what they were expecting."

Several years ago, before James Goggin left London to become the director of design, publishing and new media for the Museum of Contemporary Art, he was buying concert prints from Butcher and Nakanishi, the North Center neighborhood-based artists who call themselves Sonnenzimmer. "Their reputation most certainly preceded them," he said. "Their work could have verged on twee if it were handled poorly, but instead I think of them as making visual translations of noise — like sonograms of musical artists. They also, because they're not precious, embodied, for me anyway, in England, a kind of Chicago spirit."

Which is hilarious.

The concert posters that Nick and Nadine have made during their six years as Sonnenzimmer — German for "sunroom" — are as removed from typical Chicago gig posters as to be, well, mostly unrecognizable as gig posters. As Jay Ryan, the most celebrated poster designer in Chicago, put it: "If all of us (gig-poster designers) were musicians, they would be off in a corner playing free jazz. Trust me, of all the people around here making posters, Nick and Nadine are the ones who will be in design textbooks 50 years from now."

For a couple of New York shows by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, they created posters depicting colorful, vaguely robotic people soaring across stark, Xerox-gray landscapes; the name of the band ran in the margin, and the place, time and date of the concerts ran in tiny print at the bottom, as if it were an afterthought. And that's one of Sonnenzimmer's least abstract posters — the poster for a recent Lincoln Hall show by the band Codeine was an image of grass on windy hill, the concert details barely decipherable.

In other words, depending on your relationship to their work, Nick and Nadine can be good or bad news: If you want concert poster art to hang that will look like more like traditional art (and won't date within a year), their appeal is obvious. Certainly they have their super-fans: Last year Goggin invited them to participate in the MCA's "We are Here: Art & Design Out of Context." They raised $20,000 to self-publish a book of their art, due in the fall, with a Kickstarter campaign that ended this month. And their client list tends to be as weighty with cultural institutions (Poetry magazine, the Newberry library, the Mies van der Rohe Society) as with music acts.

Nadine said: "The truth is, without musicians directly asking us to do posters for them, it'd be hard for us to get concert poster work." Nick said: "Venues won't hire us." Nadine said: "Just say it, venues hate us." Nick said: "Because they don't know what they're going to get — it won't look like a gig poster to most of them."

He grew up in small town Tennessee; she grew up in Switzerland. They were boyfriend-girlfriend before they were Sonnenzimmer. He excels at painting; she's a master typographer, though both try their hand at the other's specialty. Nadine said: "For me, the poster is the king discipline of visual communication, combining font, lettering, image, history, technique — it's a sieve for what the culture is." Nick said: "Posters saved us. It allowed us to be relevant and show people our skills. We make fine art. But the poster has immediacy."

A sign hangs in the window of Ryan's studio in Skokie: "Sorry, We're Sorry." It reads like a gentle reminder that this studio is no store. On a recent afternoon, he lets in a pair of Swedish tourists, who buy hundreds of dollars of his posters, but that's just to save them the shipping cost, he says. He's sheepish about his cult, the reason for the closed-shop policy immediately obvious: He doesn't want to do this all day. And he could. Almost two decades after designing his first concert poster, then picking up more and more work through word of mouth, Ryan's art has become among the most ubiquitous in rock, his rough-sketch style recognizable at a glance, his roster of current and former clients a who's who of indie rock: The Shins, The Decemberists, Spoon, James Murphy (of LCD Soundsystem), Hum, Broken Social Scene …

"Has he helped shape my visual image?" asked musician Andrew Bird, for whom Ryan has designed many posters and album covers. "Certainly, especially in the 'Weather Systems' and 'Mysterious Production of Eggs' period (of albums), which was a sort of rebirth for me musically. He helped define that sound visually."

Ryan's style is whimsical, hand-drawn, full of random animal imagery, the rulered lines beneath his lettering often still evident, as though he were 9 years old and trying to keep the text level on a science fair poster. "Crapiness," he said, in typically dry tones. "My style is called crapiness. It has a certain crapiness. But there's a reason: My work is very much based on drawing, and I don't try to hide the history of my drawings."

Ryan grew up in Northfield, studied painting at theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He worked at the Empty Bottle and Touch and Go Records and for a while as an apprentice carpenter. "But all my friends played in bands, and when they needed a T-shirt design or a poster, they would ask me," Ryan said.

So he went to work for poster designer Steve Walters at the seminal Chicago gig-poster business Screwball Press, picking up work from iconic hipster bands (Shellac) and hangouts (Lounge Ax). "All the major labels were always around then, trying to create the next Seattle scene" Walters remembered, "and it was a good time to get your stuff out there. Also, Jay's posters were very different. There was the bright-colors-bold-images school of poster design; then there was this — more handmade, more subtle."

These days Ryan is one of a handful of elder statesmen of gig-poster design. He has two employees — a recent art school graduate and his father, who fill orders for old prints. His backroom has two silk-screening presses. He has a wife and a daughter. And his posters often seem to be as much about the rhythms of domestic contentment as indie rock. "This poster," he said, looking over one of his latest prints, which showed a drawing of his garage populated by animals, "this is an art print, not a concert poster. It has small gorillas, oversize bicycles, a monster cat holding up the roof." Add words and you could put on a show.